VariAbilities International Conference, July 2023

Bridging the Gap: Bringing the Human Sciences together with the Humanities

20 July 2023 at the Hunterian Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons of England

How do we understand our bodies? Our own bodies might be the first we experience as children, but how do we use this lived experience to understand the bodies of other people? The bodies of everyday folks we meet on the street, bodies that may range from healthy to diseased, able to disabled, sports fit to couch potato, real to represented, cared for to cared by, and everything you can think of in between—how do we think about people who are like us but also somehow different? What knowledges do such encounters between variAble bodies create?

The conference location, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, has at its heart the anatomy and pathology collections of the eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. The Museum invites us to encounter the full range of humanity that has been and is still the subject of study, and exhibition. But what is this study, this exhibition?

As John Hunter suggests: “Some Physiologists will have it that the Stomach is a Mill; others, that it is a fermenting Vat; others, again that it is a Stewpan; but in my view of the matter, it is neither a Mill, a Fermenting vat nor a stew-pan, but a STOMACH, Gentlemen, a Stomach.” We all have experience of a stomach, but embedded in Hunter’s statement is metaphor (the object of study of the Humanities) and an apparently directly understandable truth (the object of study of Science). Is there a discussion possible between the way we, as lay people and as surgeons, understand one another?

The conference focused on the experience of specific and variAble bodies and their humanity from classical antiquity to the contemporary.

Speakers:

Wendy Turner, Augusta University Medieval Medical Education: Forensics, Teaching, and the Hans von Gersdorff Wound-Man

Maddy Mant, University of Toronto Archival bodies: Anthropology and bioethics

Tina Welch, University of Winchester The ‘Carib Chief’s skull’; where was humanity in late-eighteenth century colonial science.

Heidi Dawson Hobbis and Jocelyn Davis, University of Winchester Understanding elderly bodies in bioarchaeology: a case study of George and Elizabeth Cumberland of Bristol

Matt Cathey, Wofford College “Visualizing” Calculus: the Pedagogy of a Blind Mathematician

Karissa Bushman, Quinnipiac University Donkeys to Devine: Goya’s Depictions of Doctors and Medicine

Justo Hernandez, Universidad de La Laguna Understanding the human body in the Renaissance